A father who shot his two-year-old daughter in the face with a sawn-off shotgun has been sentenced to four years in prison.
Gustav Otto Sanft, 26, was sentenced at the Auckland High Court on Thursday after being found guilty of his daughter Amokura Daniels-Sanft’s manslaughter, according to the New Zealand Herald.
Amokura was shot in the face in the family’s South Auckland home as they were moving house on June 2, 2016.
Gustav Otto Sanft was sentenced to four years four months in prison for shooting his daughter
Amokura Daniels-Sanft was shot in the face by her father while she was playing on a couch
She was playing on a couch before she was shot by her father just above her left eye at close range.
Her skull fractured in what was described as a ‘significant and unsurvivable head wound’.
Justice Geoffrey Venning sentenced Sanft to four years and four months in prison, guilty of manslaughter and unlawful possession of a pistol.
Sanft claimed he didn’t realise the gun was loaded and that it ‘exploded’, but the judge disputed that claim.
He said Sanft was ‘much more familiar’ with the weapon than he made out.
The gun was modified and faulty, but firearms expects found the trigger would still have to be pulled for the gun to fire.
Amokura’s mother Julia Daniels said her daughter’s life was ‘cut short at the hands of daddy’, calling it an ‘unforgettable day’.
After police arrived at the scene, Sanft told Detective James Ralph that he ‘didn’t know the gun was loaded’.
Sanft, 26, was found guilty of manslaughter and unlawful possession of a pistol
‘Ah f**k. The gun doesn’t work. It never does,’ he said.
The injuries to Amokura were described as ‘catastrophic’.
Senior Constable Jackie Fyfe was one of the first police officers to arrive at the scene, and gave harrowing testimony as to what she saw.
‘My job was to check if that child was alive… I didn’t know it was a little girl, I looked… she wasn’t moving and she didn’t have half of her head.’
Sanft claimed that the gun ‘just exploded’, but experts said the trigger had to be pulled to fire